Getting youngsters to go outside and play isn't just about family support, but also relies on a neighbourhood coming together to create a good environment, University of Alberta research shows.
In a study involving 92 preschoolers and their families, the children tended to spend more time playing actively outdoors when their parents felt a strong sense of community involvement, says Yeongho Hwang, who led the research as part of his PhD work in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation.
"Community efforts that strengthen civic engagement to improve the neighbourhood and address shared concerns - such as creating safer environments - may help create more supportive conditions for preschool-aged children to play outdoors," he notes.
That active outdoor play - unstructured, fun physical activity - is important for healthy development, helping kids make social connections, improve their attention and focus, lower stress, build strong bones and get essential amounts of vitamin D, Hwang adds.
Making sure youngsters have a chance to frolic outdoors also supports their "right to play," stemming from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, he notes.
"It recognizes play as a fundamental right of every child, so active outdoor play is one way of supporting that during the preschool years."
To give researchers an accurate picture of daily movement, each child taking part in the study wore a small elastic belt with an accelerometer to capture movement intensity and a GPS monitor to record location, over seven days during waking hours. At the same time, parents completed a questionnaire about child, family and neighbourhood social factors, and kept diaries detailing their child's daily activities, including time, location and companions for each activity. By combining all of the data, researchers were able to identify when the children were physically active outdoors in non-organized, non-travel activities.
The study examined children's active outdoor play in three ways. It looked at light-intensity and moderate- to vigorous-intensity active outdoor play separately, then combined the two to calculate total active outdoor play. After accounting for seasonal variation, the research showed that individual and family factors added relatively little to explaining differences in how much the children played actively outdoors. Instead, neighbourhood social factors contributed the most, explaining an additional nine to 12 per cent of these differences in each of the three measures.
In particular, youngsters played outside significantly more when there was community involvement in efforts to improve the community, such as by organizing meetings with police and other groups to promote neighbourhood safety.
Though more research is needed to test the theory directly, it's possible that civic engagement "may help strengthen social connections and improve neighbourhood safety by enabling residents to work together to address shared concerns," Hwang notes.
"If parents feel their neighbourhood is safer, they may be more comfortable giving their children opportunities to play outdoors."
By looking at social factors, rather than just the demographics or physical features of neighbourhoods that research typically focuses on, the study provides new insight into how to get youngsters back outside to play, says professor Dr. Valerie Carson, a co-author and supervisor on the work.
"Research has shown that active outdoor play has been declining across generations, so it's important to understand what factors might explain that in order to reverse this trend."
